AUCTIONBY LAUREN SMARTPHOTOGRAPHY BY WILLIAM BICHARA

eeing the world through the eyes of
Pierre-Auguste Renoir will soon be
possible—with a little imagination.

A pair of eyeglasses that belonged to
the artist is just one of several hundred items
to be auctioned off by Heritage Auctions in
New York at the Fletcher–Sinclair Mansion on
September 19.

The Unknown Renoir: The Man, the Husband,
the Father, the Artist is an unprecedented sale
by the auction house. It includes The Pierre-Auguste Renoir Archival collection as well as
several paintings and a series of original plaster
maquettes. Heritage’s Dallas location has
housed this collection for almost a year and
brought in Virginie Journiac Saint de Meard,
the world’s foremost expert on the subject of
Renoir, to catalogue and curate. Saint de Meard
happily accepted the opportunity and plans to
publish a new book on the artist this year.

“For the cataloguers and researchers of
Renoir, the sale of this collection is huge,”
says Brian Roughton, managing director of
fine art at Heritage. “For almost a year [Saint

S

de Meard] has been organizing this hugecollection to fully document its significance.”A little over a year ago, Roughton received aphone call from the owners of the Renoir Estate.They had bought this extensive collection as onepiece at auction and were interested in releasingit to the market. Roughton decided it would bebetter to auction the pieces individually giventhe breadth of the anthology, which includeseverything from intimate correspondencebetween Renoir and his wife to the artist’s

Légion d’honneur officer medal.

The plaster models have a much more
complicated history, as they were one piece
of a much larger copyright battle between
members of the Renoir family and that of his
gallery assistant Richard Guino, who claimed a
portion of the creative ownership—a conflict
that lasted more than 30 years. When it was
resolved, the opportunity to bring these pieces
to auction resurfaced.

“What we have here is really a treasure troveof work, which is going to open up a wholenew world,” Roughton says. “The archives arean opportunity to see the progression of hislife, much of which there is very little researchabout.”According to Roughton, the auction will bemost appealing to serious collectors of Renoir,and he foresees museums or universities asthe ideal buyers for the business and personalitems.

It’s one of the first artist estate sales of
this magnitude for Heritage and a rare sale
for any auction house. Typically estates of this
type would have been broken down at some
point in the artist’s lifespan, but this collection
contains an overwhelming amount of personal
and professional material. Alongside the
complete dossiers of Renoir’s work, including
many unseen paintings, the auction includes
glass plate negatives of photographs of the
artist at work and at play.

“It’s an opportunity to see the progression
of his life,” Roughton says. “For years, we’ve
only been able to know Renoir through his
paintings. This will change that. Now people
will be able to own a part of Renoir.” P